Data corruption is the accidental change of a file or the loss of information which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason may be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file can become partially or completely corrupted, so it'll no longer work correctly because its bits shall be scrambled or lacking. An image file, for instance, will no longer display an actual image, but a random mix of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack as its content will be unreadable, etcetera. If this kind of an issue appears and it's not noticed by the system or by an admin, the data will be corrupted silently and in case this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the information is synced between various drives, the corrupted file will be copied on all the other drives and the harm will be permanent. A number of widely used file systems either do not have real-time checks or don't have good ones that can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a rather common matter on hosting servers where substantial amounts of info are stored.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Cloud Hosting

The integrity of the data which you upload to your new cloud hosting account shall be ensured by the ZFS file system that we work with on our cloud platform. The majority of internet hosting providers, including our firm, use multiple HDDs to store content and considering that the drives work in a RAID, identical data is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive becomes corrupted for some reason, yet, it is likely that it will be duplicated on the other drives since alternative file systems do not feature special checks for that. In contrast to them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for each and every file. If a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, and the damaged copy shall be substituted with a good one from a different hard drive. Because this happens instantly, there's no risk for any of your files to ever be corrupted.

No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We have avoided any risk of files getting damaged silently since the servers where your semi-dedicated hosting account will be created work with a powerful file system known as ZFS. Its basic advantage over various other file systems is that it uses a unique checksum for each file - a digital fingerprint which is checked in real time. As we save all content on a number of SSD drives, ZFS checks whether the fingerprint of a file on one drive matches the one on the rest of the drives and the one it has stored. In case there's a mismatch, the damaged copy is replaced with a good one from one of the other drives and considering that this happens instantly, there is no chance that a corrupted copy can remain on our hosting servers or that it can be duplicated to the other hard drives in the RAID. None of the other file systems employ this kind of checks and in addition, even during a file system check right after a sudden power failure, none of them will find silently corrupted files. In comparison, ZFS will not crash after a power failure and the regular checksum monitoring makes a time-consuming file system check unneeded.